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architecture and design magazineTue, 31 Mar 2015 21:00:38 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1"No one will ever write a book called Zen and the Art of iPhone Maintenance"http://www.dezeen.com/2014/08/29/justin-mcguirk-opinion-bose-headphones-internet-of-broken-things/
http://www.dezeen.com/2014/08/29/justin-mcguirk-opinion-bose-headphones-internet-of-broken-things/#commentsFri, 29 Aug 2014 09:48:43 +0000http://admin.dezeen.com/?p=528934Opinion: is the Internet of Broken Things the logical conclusion to the ever-escalating cycle of technological development and built-in obsolesce in our gadgets, asks Justin McGuirk. You know when there's a teenager on the bus listening to music on his mobile – without headphones – and all the other passengers are stealing glances, unsure whether […]

Opinion: is the Internet of Broken Things the logical conclusion to the ever-escalating cycle of technological development and built-in obsolesce in our gadgets, asks Justin McGuirk.

You know when there's a teenager on the bus listening to music on his mobile – without headphones – and all the other passengers are stealing glances, unsure whether he's oblivious or sociopathic? Well things like that give the impression that cities are getting noisier, and that we need to retreat ever deeper into ourselves. I'm not convinced it's true. But one man who would have taken this incident as cast-iron proof was the social critic Ivan Illich.

"Silence is a commons," wrote Illich. He argued that just as the communal pastures were privatised in the 18th century, so now the collective sense of calm is being invaded by technology. He was thinking of loudspeakers, computers and electronic gadgets, which he lumped together in a single category: "the machines". This was in the 1980s, before email, mobile phones, texting and the infinite stream of social media. One can only imagine what he would have made of this daily communication firebombing. But the battered and shrivelled human attention span, if not quite a commons, would certainly have appeared to Illich as a victim of noise.

The QC 15s are the product of an arcane branch of physics that the rest of us know simply as 'magic'

What struck me about Illich's argument is that my own response to the erosion of silence was the exact opposite of what he would have advocated. Faced with a dwindling commons, I was forced to privatise my own patch. I did this with a pair of Bose QuietComfort ® 15 headphones. Not only do they sequester the ears behind a wall of black leather, they feature "Acoustic Noise Cancelling ® technology". The way noise-cancelling works, in brief, is by measuring enemy sound waves and retaliating with their mirror image – the sonic equivalent of anti-matter. It's an invisible battle in which competing sound waves cancel each other out. Victory is the sound of orbital noise flatlining – silence is a sonic massacre. In other words, the QC 15s are the product of an arcane branch of physics that the rest of us know simply as "magic".

Man invented noise-cancelling to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for helicopter and airplane pilots, but later found a much more lucrative market in music lovers. I confess that I am no high-fidelity obsessive. I do not (although I think I'm in the minority here) manoeuvre through London in my own private sound bubble, listening to Eye of the Tiger as I power-cycle down the Clerkenwell Road. I shelled out for this exorbitantly pricey piece of equipment at a time when I was sharing an office and found that I simply couldn't concentrate. It's not the roiling drone of the city that is distracting – white noise is just fine. It's specific noise that is invasive, that conversation that earworms its way into your consciousness and, like a bad guest, won't leave.

Ideally, I was aiming for a portable isolation ward. Donning the QC 15s, you are met with the gentle roar of a conch shell. But flick the switch on the right ear-cup and you are suddenly hooded in silence. It's not the hollow sound freeze of outer space, but at the very least a tech-y tea cosy that takes the edge off. (Tip: for persistent earworms, add a layer of ambient insulation, something Brian Eno-ish or Arvo Pärt-ish.)

Easily distracted people such as myself attune all too readily to the peripheral, and there are times – pace Illich – when what is central must be walled off and gated. This is beginning to sound an awful lot like the neoliberalisation of sound, isn't it?

Anyway, suffice to say that I got quite used to working this way, and to tuning out with my QC 15s on planes, and generally felt quite protective of my own fenced-off pasture of silence. Given time, I might have devolved into one of those Second Amendment nutjobs guarding the picket fence with their own private firepower. But no. For the beloved headphones broke.

Weren't the DIY and Maker movements supposed to deliver us from the cycle of dispose-and-consume?

One day I was trying to watch a film clip when all I could pick up was the background music. The dialogue was missing. Mouths moved but no sound issued forth.

Not to worry, I thought. This is an expensive piece of kit, it's bound to come with an iron-clad five-year warranty. I checked. One year. Naturally, I had owned mine for two.

I wasted no time in emailing Bose customer service. I was polite. I complimented them on their excellent equipment. But I was also a disgruntled consumer with rights. "What do you mean by charging £250 for a pair of headphones that only lasts two years?" I was indignant. I was in charge. I may even have mentioned that I was a journalist. A design critic. The memory's hazy but it's possible I threatened to bring this outrage to public attention.

While I awaited the customer service team's grovelling response, I googled "broken Bose headphones". Sifting through the forums, I encountered the usual welter of repetitive outrage and fanboy infatuation. The options seemed to be a choice between getting a discount replacement (and prolonging the Bose bromance) or cursing the company's very existence. There were few options for repairing them oneself (because, I suppose, the majority of consumers are not magicians). Which is a pity, because I had started to see self-help forums as the natural successors to the electrical repair shops that once existed on smaller high streets. Weren't the DIY and Maker movements supposed to deliver us from the cycle of dispose-and-consume?

The logic of today's products is heading ineluctably one way

Whenever the subject of fixing things comes up, I'm always reminded of two devices in my life that endured against the odds. One was a television set that my American grandparents bought long before I was born, a small wooden wardrobe with a curved screen that still clunked through the channels dependably well into my early adulthood. The other is a car, a Volkswagen Golf from the 1980s belonging to my in-laws that is so famously reliable and economical that strangers in petrol stations still routinely offer to buy it.

Despite being mechanically inept, I tend to romanticise a world of mechanical objects – of motorcycles and replacement valves. The obvious problem with today's hyper-performing, magical products is that they are black boxes. We are so in love with their metaphysics, with their gestalt, that we forgive their ephemerality. No one will ever write a book called Zen and the Art of iPhone Maintenance.

It seems to me that the logic of today's products is heading ineluctably one way. Our devices will be able to do more and more, while lasting less and less long, until eventually they can do everything for no time at all. In the future, we will bestride the Earth like gods, wielding awesome, omnipotent gadgets that break after two minutes. Calling up customer services at [insert evil tech company] we will be told that the warranty was only one minute, and didn't we read the terms and conditions?

Our household gadgets will be giving up the ghost long before they've siphoned off enough data to be of any use

Here we are fretting about the Internet of Things, and the fact that our toasters will be spying on us, when in fact by the advent of this paradigm shift our household gadgets will be giving up the ghost long before they've siphoned off enough data to be of any use to our overlords. The IoBT – the Internet of Broken Things – is not quite such a world-changing proposition. Or perhaps, just perhaps, the allure of accessing all our data will finally persuade manufacturers to make things that last. Maybe consumer brands will give up on built-in obsolescence in return for endless surveillance. Hurray.

After four days there was still no reply from Bose. I tweeted @BoseService, girding myself for an all-out public spat. They were very apologetic. They pointed out that my headphones came with a spare cable. Had I tried swapping the cables?

I hadn't. And swapping the cables seems – embarrassingly – to have done the trick. My QC 15s are back at peak noise reduction capacity. They're firing off negative waves like the fury. The silence that Illich said is "taken from us by machines" has been restored to me by my machine. As you were.

Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator based in London. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He has been the design columnist for The Guardian, the editor of Icon magazine and the design consultant to Domus. His book Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture was published by Verso in June 2014.

]]>http://www.dezeen.com/2014/08/29/justin-mcguirk-opinion-bose-headphones-internet-of-broken-things/feed/3Headphones by Renaud Defrancesco transmit music through clear plastic bandhttp://www.dezeen.com/2014/02/27/headphones-by-renaud-defrancesco-transmit-music-through-clear-plastic-band/
http://www.dezeen.com/2014/02/27/headphones-by-renaud-defrancesco-transmit-music-through-clear-plastic-band/#commentsThu, 27 Feb 2014 19:00:47 +0000http://admin.dezeen.com/?p=422340ECAL student Renaud Defrancesco has designed a transparent acrylic glass headband that passes music vibrations across its surface to the ears. "It's a new way to listen to music," Renaud Defrancesco told Dezeen. "You are bathed in music without being isolated like with normal headphones, which can be dangerous because you don't hear what's around you." His Vibso […]

ECAL student Renaud Defrancesco has designed a transparent acrylic glass headband that passes music vibrations across its surface to the ears.

"It's a new way to listen to music," Renaud Defrancesco told Dezeen. "You are bathed in music without being isolated like with normal headphones, which can be dangerous because you don't hear what's around you."

His Vibso headphones play tracks via Bluetooth and create sound using a vibrating electromagnet hidden in the top of the headband, beneath an opaque plastic cover. Similar to how a speaker works, the electromagnet moves a connecting element that in turn causes a membrane to pulsate.

However, instead of a black round plastic layer used in traditional speakers, this surface is formed from two-millimetre-thick transparent acrylic glass. "The membrane is in acrylic glass because it transmits the sound well, has a good flexibility and it's easy to thermoform," explained Defrancesco.

The vibrations spread across the curved membrane down to the sections that cover the ears, where they are heard as music without the user feeling the tiny movements. "The shape of the headphones directs the sound inward, so a person close by will not hear the music," said Defrancesco.

Comparing his design to large padded noise-cancelling headphones, Defrancesco's list of advantages includes being able to share music with others if they touch their ear to the other side of the headband and not causing sides of the head to overheat.

The band can also be covered in padded fabric for added comfort. Defrancesco showed the project at the Ecole Cantonale d'art de Lausanne's Half-Time exhibition earlier this month.

]]>http://www.dezeen.com/2014/02/27/headphones-by-renaud-defrancesco-transmit-music-through-clear-plastic-band/feed/4Otokurage by Nendohttp://www.dezeen.com/2011/05/18/otokurage-by-nendo/
http://www.dezeen.com/2011/05/18/otokurage-by-nendo/#commentsWed, 18 May 2011 17:17:52 +0000http://www.dezeen.com/?p=128824Japanese designers Nendo have produced these transparent sets of earphones that look like jellyfish. The earphones are available in a variety of colours and come packaged in small plastic bottles. Photography is by Hiroshi Iwasaki and Masayuki Hayashi. More projects by Nendo on Dezeen »More stories about headphones on Dezeen » The following is from the designers: We […]

We designed earphones “otokurage” for a Japanese computer accessories manufacturer “ELECOM”

“otokurage(oto=sound, kurage=jellyfish)”

design concept
We enlarged the silicon ear caps that cover earphones to hide the entire device, creating a set of in-ear headphones with a soft feel and an unusual transparency like that of a jellyfish.

Because the earphones' components are unified into one piece, substituting the colour or size of the earcap changes their look entirely.

To keep with the image of a jellyfish floating in the water, the packaging was inspired by a PET plastic soft drink bottle.

]]>http://www.dezeen.com/2011/05/18/otokurage-by-nendo/feed/1EOps Noisezero i+ Eco by Michael Younghttp://www.dezeen.com/2010/12/22/eops-noisezero-i-eco-by-michael-young/
http://www.dezeen.com/2010/12/22/eops-noisezero-i-eco-by-michael-young/#commentsWed, 22 Dec 2010 12:55:36 +0000http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2010/12/dzn_EOPS-by-Michael-Young-5.jpgHong Kong designer Michael Young has created a range of bio-plastic in-ear headphones made of cornstarch. Called EOps Noisezero i+ Eco, the products have silicon tips and come in four colours. See all our stories about Michael Young » The information below is from Michael Young: EOps NOISEZERO i+ in-ear headphones with Remote/Mic for iPod, […]

The EOps Noisezero i+ Eco edition uses revolutionary eco-friendly cornstarch bio-plastics for the ear-buds and the microphone housing. In our design process, we found that by using cornstarch bio-plastics to build the ear-buds acoustics chamber, natural feeling mid tone can be achieved.

The unique horn shaped ear-buds chamber optimized acoustics performance for brilliant treble and the extra large bass reflect port at the back provides super strong bass whilst celebrating these as design features.

The form factor of the ear buds was also designed to assist the ease of positioning and passive noise isolation.

The user can hold the slim part of the ear buds when inserting the silicone ear tips into the ear canal, and then rotate the ear buds 90 degrees such that the silicone ear tips can achieve good acoustic seal in the ear canals for best audio results.

The microphone and remote module on the headphones cable is an Apple-approved three-button version, letting you control playback as well as volume level for the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad, and recent iPod. The EOps Noisezero i+ Eco edition comes in colors of charcoal, rustic brown, midnight blue and sage green. A carrying case is included in the pack.

See also:

]]>http://www.dezeen.com/2010/12/22/eops-noisezero-i-eco-by-michael-young/feed/10TMA-1 By KiBiSi for AIAIAIhttp://www.dezeen.com/2010/08/11/tma-1-by-kibisi-for-aiaiai/
http://www.dezeen.com/2010/08/11/tma-1-by-kibisi-for-aiaiai/#commentsWed, 11 Aug 2010 15:10:20 +0000http://www.dezeen.com/?p=91166Danish industrial design firm Kibisi launch these minimal headphones today. The headphones are a collaboration with Danish electronics company AIAIAI who wanted a durable design. TMA-1 is a name taken from an Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it describes a machine that was long lasting and reliable. The headphones are […]

The headphones are a collaboration with Danish electronics company AIAIAI who wanted a durable design.

TMA-1 is a name taken from an Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it describes a machine that was long lasting and reliable.

The headphones are finished in matte black rubber, nylon and plastic.

Here's some more from the designers:

The TMA-1 by AIAIAI - The idea of a headphone

Danish headphone company AIAIAI, are just about to launch their unique new DJ headphone, the TMA-1, a lead-user-developed piece of audio equipment that looks set to renew the way that lifestyle technology is marketed. The design of TMA-1 is simple, and then some. It is stripped down to nothing more than the essentials. No ornaments, colors or other distractions. Only a very discrete and hidden logo indicates that these headphones come from an established brand.

This marks a new route in a terrain, that for the last couple of years have seen an endless array of products branded with extensive logos, and marketed by celebrities. The TMA-1 travels on a different road, and with it's simple and iconic look, it is essentially nothing more, than the idea of the headphone.

The TMA-1 headphone has been tested and tweaked by the world’s most skilled and interesting DJ's. In total 28 of the world's most progressive DJ's have been consulted through both the developmental and testing stages, in questions related to sound, form and durability. This process has given a valuable insight into the needs among touring musicians whose headphones are to endure 4-5 gigs a week, and a load of travelling on top of that.

This insight has brought into the design and choice of materials by the inimitable Danish design-firm KiBiSi. Others involved in the process have been the label Tartelet records, the producers, Mannhandle and the communication-agency, Thank You For Clapping. The entire process has given a valuable insight into the needs among touring musicians, whose headphones are to endure 4-5 gigs a week, and a load of travelling on top of that. The TMA-1 built for musicians, by musicians.

Launch and dates

TMA-1 is set to launch in early August and this new piece of irresistible gear that has been fittingly (it resembles the foreboding, black monolith) named the ‘Tycho Magnetic Anomaly’ after the mysterious phenomenon from Arthur C. Clarke’s groundbreaking novel ‘2001:A Space Odyssey’. Needless to say, this wink to originality has a lot to do with the impressive list of lead-user-testers of the TMA-1, such as Erol Alkan, Flying Lotus, Matthew Dear and Seth Troxler.

AIAIAI are sticking to outlets and boutiques that fully understand the aesthetics, concept and potential of the TMA-1: The product will therefore be available only at Apple Outlets and boutiques such Firmament, Colette, Bodega, Corso Como, Dijital Fix and insider record stores such as Phonica in London and Turn Table Lab in New York. The latest addition to this list of outlets, are the testers’ venerated record labels such as Ghostly International and this partnership looks promising to say the least. Get your TMA-1 at your nearest impeccable boutique, record store or label online shop.

The global launch dates are:

Berlin on the 11th of august
Tokyo on the 14th of august
New York on the 18th of august